Woke up confused on Thursday morning, after a night spent talking to a dog with a human head, dodging feathers thrown by a woman on a rocking horse in the rafters, avoiding a man with a fox snout moulded onto his mouth, exchanging glances with a badger couple, and applauding a woman who set her nipples on fire with a candle lit by an electrified cucumber – the Future Christmas party. The text from Craig that woke me up said the new Team Fortress 2 update namechecked me. !?

The office is nuts at the moment because we’re just finishing the shortest issue cycle of the year, so we were already exhausted when we headed up to Reading for Play with PC Gamer Live: our big free LAN party. Met a lot of names I knew from comments here, as well as Twitter and the PCG blog.

The event was partly to launch our PC Gamer Top 100 site. We’ve done our Top 100 article in the new issue, now we’re gathering votes for a gigantic public one. In the mag, Deus Ex has won for the first time ever – it’d be awesome to see it win the public vote as well. Vote!

One of the main games we played there was Team Fortress 2, so Craig got in touch with Valve beforehand to see if they could lend us some cheaty weapons to hurt our readers with during the event. To their enormous credit, despite being days away from launching a major update, they did. We were able to turn ourselves into slow but nigh-invincible Medics with eternally critting bonesaws, Scout-speed Heavies with deadly boxing gloves, and Soldiers with rapid-fire rocket launchers that do one hundred times the normal damage and heal us with every hit.

The next day the update was out, and I was determined to play fair. But then Robin, who sorted these ultra-weapons out for us, showed up in one of my matches and challenged me to a ridiculous weapon duel. I’d already seen him use the rocket launcher he loaned us, so I was picturing a jousting match with that when I agreed. I hadn’t considered what Valve’s personal versions of the new Demoman weapons might be.

He’s invincible, on fire and able to kill anything in one hit – even me. I’m the Blue Soldier here, the video is taken by a Red Soldier named Traxantic, who by rights should have destroyed me many times over.

Powerful and on fire I can deal with, but invincible makes things tricky. It meant the match was primarily about stopping him from getting to me, which meant buffeting him with streams of rockets as he charged. Inevitably he’d get too close, and I’d have to rocket-jump away and spray a salvo down on the map as I flew.

I apologise to the many, many people killed in the crossfire, and also the people I just shot. Not everyone in the game knew who Robin worked for or guessed that my weapons were probably his doing, so some names were slung. Sorry dudes!

For those that asked, I’m afraid I don’t have my ‘special’ pickaxe to show you yet – looks like there are still some teething problems with this update that ought to be ironed out first. I think it’ll be a regular pickaxe with a subtle sparkle to it and eventually a custom name, rather than a cheat-o-matic megapick. I still plan to use it to the exclusion of all else.

The rest of the week was consumed by stuff you don’t care about, but it’s been awesome and exhausting in equal measure. I think we might finally be approaching the relaxing part of Christmas, so today I do nothing that doesn’t have ‘Fortress’, ‘Commander’ or ‘Trek’ in the title.

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Jazmeister: I wonder if that could just be a game mode by itself? There must be a way to enable server specific weapons.

RichardZK: Some servers run a gamemode called 1 vs. all where one dude is massively overpowered and all the other players on the server have to take him out.

FraktuRe: I've been on servers before where you have random class and random weapons, it's epic fun being a scout with a minigun etc.

Also, congrats!

Jesus: yeah there are servers running a plugin that has gamemodes where either one juggernaut who fires like pentadact did in that video gets hunted by normal players, or everyone is in that turbo firing mode, with huge bunnyhop boosts and such.

now this is where this becomes a shameless plug, i've set the website field to be that of the plugin's main community.

Havokroft: See, this is what TF2 is supposed to be all about; ridiculous silly OTT fun.

What server did this epic duel take place on, out of interest? PCG or other? Also congrats on the equalizer recognition! It's a wonderful, wonderful unlock. Makes me wonder what the future holds for Mr Tom Francis now that we know Valve has their eye on him...

Out Reach: Wow thanks for putting traxes video in a blog post :)

I've linked him to this, and he should say hi at some point.

LaZodiac: TeamFortress 2, Wind Comander, and the Star Trek MMO?

Just taking a guess at what you've got lined up.

Traxantic: Hey thanks man for putting my video in! I had lots of fun with that update (and still), and especially you and Robin hopping in!

Merry Christmas!

Jazmeister: @LaZodiac: Ah, Wind Commander. The glory days of ushering soft breezes by managing local air pressure, racking up gust combos, and finally summoning the Ithaqua to rampage across rural farmland. It could also be Supreme Commander.

Since Valve reads everything associated with Tom Francis, I thought this'd be a good place to mention that my wife hit Soldier Milestone 2 (and now 3) and didn't get the new rocket launcher. She got her banner ok. Anyone else experienced this?

Also, would anyone care to whine about how overpowered the equalizer is?

Tom Francis: Yeah, I'm kinda taking it easy for now because I hit both Soldier and Demo milestones 2 without getting the unlock. It's common, a fix is coming, and missing weapons will be retroactively awarded. You can use Achievement Manager to re-lock the Milestone and re-earn it, but I think I'm just going to wait for the fix. Using external programs to mess with my account makes me a little uneasy.

SenatorPalpatine: Posts are showing up in full on Google Reader again, thanks for that Tom.

Shamefully I still haven't played Deus Ex. I'll tend to that during winter break. (Along with Arkham Asylum)

Pod!: Traxantic is king of airshots it seems.

Tom Francis: The reason they weren't before was that WordPress's option to do so was broken in an update, and I had to hack the code to fix it. It would reset every time I updated WP, which is all the freaking time since the hack. In 2.9, they seem to have fixed it to just work in the first place. Welcome back to square one!

Part of the reason it took them this long is probably that one of the admins on their support forum decided everyone who complained of this problem was just using the wrong type of RSS reader, and would insult them and lock the thread.

LaZodiac: @JazMiester: Er, I ment Wing Commander, my bad.

Lack_26: @JazMiester,

Damn you, now I really want a weather control game. Wreaking havoc on the human race as they power you with global warming sounds really fun. You'd have to balance the destruction with keeping them able to still pump out the green-house gases that heat up the earth. I wish someone would make a game like that.

Dante: Hello Tom! We met briefly at the Live event where the multiple people by the same name confused all.

Incidentally, Ludo thinks your new weapon should be called 'The Pentadaxe'

Inferno: Awesome video and well done on the pickaxe again tom. Sadly I didnt' get to speak to you despite being at pcglive. Yuo're easily my favourite writer for pcg but somehow I didn't get the chance! Well done all the same and I look forward to seeing your pickaxe once you've gotten it!

x25killa: PCGamer Live was epic and I did managed to backstabbed one of the overpowered medics >:)

Merry Xmas and good tidings.

Gunpoint problem?

Don't post them here, I'm a useless idiot! E-mail tech support with as much detail about your system and the problem as possible, and they can actually do something.